A boost for Atlantic salmon with Scottish project

A group that aims to support the Atlantic salmon industry has heard about the progress of a project in the north of Scotland.

Atlantic Salmon Trust’s Salmon Club event welcomed Salmon Club members and other guests to the Curzon Cinema, Mayfair, for a lively evening of important discussions and updates.

The Salmon Club brings together a group of like-minded individuals who share a passion for angling and conservation. Launched in early 2019, the Salmon Club aims to support Atlantic salmon by creating an extensive community that fuels passion and enthusiasm for protecting this iconic species.

The AST was founded in 1967 against a backdrop of growing concerns over the excessive numbers of wild salmon being taken by distant water fisheries. It was one of the first organisations devoted to the welfare of a single species and was the only conservation charity working on behalf of wild Atlantic salmon.

AST Salmon Club 2019

In 2017, AST celebrated their 50th anniversary. Their aim remains the same as it was in 1967: working to see naturally-generated stocks of wild salmon and sea trout reach sustainable levels of abundance.

Chairman of the Salmon Club, William Davies, said: ‘It was fantastic to see so many people at the Curzon cinema as part of the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s Salmon Club. The evening was extremely informative, giving members an insight into the first year of findings from the Missing Salmon Project in the Moray Firth.’

The Moray Firth Tracking Project is the largest acoustic salmon tagging and tracking project in Europe. This ground-breaking programme launched in spring 2019 and tagged 850 smolts using an acoustic telemetry tag which would track their migration on their journey to sea.

The project was based across seven project rivers throughout Scotland: Ness, Spey, Findhorn, Shin, Deveron, Conon and River Oykel.

The tracking project will run for three years and so far has managed to identify 50% of tagged smolts are going ‘missing in action’ as they migrate to sea. The scientific team at the AST are currently working tirelessly to make their way through over 15 million detections worth of information to understand what is happening to our iconic fish and next, will be looking further into these findings to identify who, or what, is responsible for them to go missing in action.

AST Salmon Club 2019

William continued: ‘The Salmon Club is a critical part of the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s bid to bring together support from throughout the UK, to inform on their work and develop a groundswell collective voice to ensure that salmon numbers start to recover in the UK.’

Salmon Club members from across the UK were the first to hear this incredible news and celebrate the accomplishment of the programme’s first year. The club aims to grow support and raise further awareness to the dramatic decline in wild Atlantic salmon.

This event was kindly sponsored by Savills.

For more information about joining AST’s Salmon Club, visit www.atlanticsalmontrust.org.

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